more on cloth

So, I’ve been trying hard to keep going with the cloth diapers. It’s a battle. I started off using them and LOVED them for a few reasons. First, cloth diapers prevent a lot of poop explosions into the clothing. Second, baby has way less skin irritation; almost never need diaper creams. Third, the reduced waste and money savings are fantastic. Okay, so sounds like some solid reasons to stick with it, but there’s one glitch–it’s a lot of fucking work!

When I’ve been home with two kids all day, the last thing I want to do before bed is clean dirty diapers. But I do it. Most of the time. The rest of the time I use disposables.

I am trying, but of course am imperfect. But hey, I figure even cloth diapering part-time is better than not doing it at all! If you need some info on why to use cloth diapers, check out the bummis website. Lots of good stuff there!

hint of spring

Last month, we had a few days that were ‘spring teasers’. Maya and I went to the beach on one perfect day and played on the shore while Morgan slept in the stroller. I can’t wait for summer!

It’s days like this that remind me why I live here.

freedom pump

Finally, my new baby girl is sleeping more at night. It seems I get at least 5 hours, and often 7 or more hours of sleep each night… that’s IN A ROW–amazing! This has been consistent for almost 3 weeks now, so I feel safe to say it without worrying that she’s going to completely regress. Sleep makes me feel human and when she sleeps from 10pm til 4am, I am generally exploding with milk. So, this is the time to pump, and when I do I can sometimes get a full 5 oz bottle–halleluyah!

The only trade-off is that I must choose to stay awake at 4am. This is hard, because after 6 hours of rest I’m at the peak of fatigue, craving a few more hours of rest. And this is when I must choose between going back to bed and having some time to myself later on. If there’s pumped milk on hand my husband can feed Morgan and I can go to the gym, the grocery store, or pretty much anywhere for more than an hour. The freedom is thrilling. Some of you might think it pathetic to be thrilled to go to the grocery store alone… I’m guessing those people have never breast fed a newborn. Sometimes I choose sleep in the wee hours of the morning, but I usually regret that choice. Trade-offs… life is full of ‘em.

When I pump a bottle of milk, I marvel at this incredible substance. It’s weird as hell that my body manufactures this stuff and that it’s the ONLY thing Morgan consumes, and she has nearly doubled her body weight since birth! She’s learning, growing and thriving from this and this alone. Not only that, she LOVES her monotonous diet of milk, milk and more milk over and above all else.

I need to take a moment here just to say: nature is incredible!

soother fingers thumb

Maya sucks her fingers. It’s a good thing because she can soothe herself and has been able to do so since she found those fingers at only a few months of age.

Maya at a few months of age

But her teeth are going to be atrocious if I can’t get her to stop. My dad sucked the same two fingers. My sister sucked hers obsessively, and she had a zillion dollars worth of dental work done to correct it (and her teeth are perfect now). Maya kind of wants to stop because she knows it’s a “big girl” thing to do… but she simply isn’t ready and still craves it. I’m working on it. Tips for helping her quit are welcome.

In the hope that Morgan wouldn’t follow in her sisters ‘finger sucking’ footsteps (and for numerous other reasons), I gave her a soother from the day she was born. I LOVE the soother. She’s not overly hooked on it and it saved my nipples from that dry, cracked, aching pain in the first weeks after she was born (I was tortured with Maya at the beginning). The soother helps people other than me calm her down and get her to sleep.  It’s so fantastic.

But this past week, Morgan has been pulling out her soother and trying eagerly to suck her thumb. In fact, she’s now practicing the thumb sucking every chance she gets.Determined to master it.

Morgan working on the thumb

I don’t think I can stop her… she’s as fixated on her thumb as her sister is on her other fingers. Whatever will I do?!

Bring on the dental bills.

Jinxed

I have clearly been too vocal about how well things were going. Right after my last post, Maya woke up with a terrible case of diarrhea. Honestly! I can’t believe it. Not only that, Morgan had been sleeping up to 8 hours a night and she went back down to 3 hour stretches last night. Maya who had been getting up at 6am slept until 8:30, but the baby woke up at 6:30–Murphy’s Law!

Maya’s newest stomach problems decided to begin at the exact time that her friend arrived for a play date, and right when the baby woke up screaming with gas pains. Maya’s anxiety over having “splat poo” as she calls it has been reborn, only much more intense this time, as she screamed hysterically that she wanted me to “make it stop” in between accidents because she couldn’t make it to the toilet on time, poor kid!

My gracious friend departed pretty quickly and I don’t blame her.  She’s 38 weeks pregnant and came with her little boy who is the same age as Maya. The morning was supposed to be a relaxing relief for her, instead she was holding my baby while I ran around helping Maya with her hysteria and clean-up. What a scene! Thank you, Universe, I am officially humbled… please forgive my hubris.

hippo candy

Sometime in December Maya got hit with a stomach bug. Not the barfing kind, but the other one, you know the ‘D-word’. She was pretty sick. Running to the toilet, having an accident in her pants in a public place (oh what fun!) and not really understanding what was going on. She even put herself to sleep for a nap when she got home… after she basically declared that she would never nap again. She was a bit freaked out by the whole thing. It passed quickly and we were all relieved.

Afterwards, I wanted to help speed her recovery so I purchased some intestinal flora for kids, you know little animal shaped vitamins with probiotics in them. The bottle had little hippos on it and Maya LOVED them. And why wouldn’t she? They taste like candy. She asked me why she was allowed to have these ‘candies’ every day, in fact twice a day without question. Afterall, I ration all her other sweets religiously. Naturally, she was perplexed by the free for all allowed by these magical ‘hippo candies’. So I explained that they would help give her “log poops” and could help prevent diarrhea.

Well somehow she got freaked out that she was going to have diarrhea every time she went to the bathroom unless she had the hippo candy in advance and she was having these anxiety attacks before every bowel movement, holding it in and frantically asking if she was going to have a healthy BM before every bathroom trip and double checking that she had taken her hippo candy. Poor kid,she became obsessed with the consistency of her poops! It was a bit of a scene. We worked hard to convince her that getting a stomach bug is actually rare, it doesn’t happen often.

Finally, after a month of more poo discussion than I ever thought I’d participate in, she is over it and has stopped asking me every day if she is going to have diarrhea and has stopped obsessing over her probiotics.

Convince me we’re normal here, what does your toddler obsess about?

The Boring Room

Morgan has been sick with a sinus cold for the past 10 days. I took her to the doctor three days ago because she looked like she was working really hard to breathe and I just wanted to make sure it was not a big deal. She didn’t have a fever and she wasn’t coughing, which I thought were the big things to watch for. My doctor took  a look at her and sent me directly to the ER to have a pediatrician examine her immediately.

It turns out that newborns are incapable of breathing through their mouths; they can only breathe through their noses. I had no idea that they couldn’t switch to mouth breathing if their noses became plugged up, and Morgan’s nose was super plugged. The pediatrician at the hospital gave her some decongestants and they put her on an oxygen monitor which revealed that her oxygen saturation was dropping and so they gave her a nebulizer with epinephrine and then gave her oxygen. Then they told me that she needed to be admitted, probably for 48 hours.

I was kind of shocked that it was so serious, but the doctor said that because she is so little and her airways are so small combined with the inability to breathe through her mouth, she was at risk for stopping breathing. After 48 hours, they reassessed her, but she was still sounding plugged up and needing oxygen at night. This meant our two day stay in pediatric isolation turned into a 3 day stay in what big sister Maya called “THE BORING ROOM”. I was basically on my own sleeping on an uncomfortable cot taking care of Morgan 24-7 while my husband was back at work, and my mother took care of Maya–THANK YOU SO MUCH MOM!

Finally, Morgan is feeling a little better and we were discharged from the hospital today. She’s still stuffed up, but not struggling to breathe nearly as much. Although, I’ll be watching her very closely from now on, just to be sure she’s truly turned the corner.

Here are some photos of our days spent in “The Boring Room” over the past three days:

The Hospital Bed

Morgan's Movember Moustache

The turtle nebulizer

More of Mr. Turtle

Big sister is unimpressed

Finally feeling better

 A big thank you to the wonderful nurses and doctors at Victoria General Hospital, without your care and kindness I think I would’ve lost my mind!

A sigh of relief

We had some serious concerns about Morgan’s health when she was in utero. I couldn’t really bring myself to blog about it, because I was so worried.

At my first ultrasound they were only able to find one kidney. This led to several other ultrasounds as my pregnancy progressed, the last of which revealed that she does in fact have two kidneys but they are fused together forming what is known as a horseshoe kidney. This is a fairly common malformation of the kidneys, but it is a condition that can be associated with other disorders, particularly chromosomal disorders. It could also increase the child’s risk for conditions like polycystic kidney disease and chronic urinary tract infections.

All of this information completely freaked me out. I began to curse modern technology for making me aware of all these possible problems, which we couldn’t confirm or disprove while I was still pregnant. I’m a worrier anyway, which is why I didn’t do any first trimester genetic testing. But then, when I heard about the kidney malformation, I began to wish I’d done the testing to confirm that nothing was amiss.

Ultimately, the doctors told me that while there was no evidence of any problems, we wouldn’t know for certain until the baby was born. I tried to accept what I could not control but all of this weighed heavily on my mind.

When Morgan was born and I saw her and held her, I got this feeling that everything was okay. I stopped worrying so much because she seemed so healthy. Even though she appeared totally normal, the pediatrician immediately scheduled a kidney ultrasound and genetic testing (in part, to allay my fears). The ultrasound confirmed the existence of a horseshoe kidney, but also indicated that the kidneys appear to be functioning normally. We will follow up next week with a pediatric urologist to get more information, but this is extremely good news. Today, we got the results from the chromosomal testing which were also totally normal. I can’t even adequately express my relief with words.

Now, we can move on and simply enjoy our time getting to know Morgan and settle in as a family of four. I couldn’t be happier!

hitting the wall

The last weeks of pregnancy are hard for anyone. Last time I was pregnant, I had a breech baby which meant I suffered through the intense pain of a head poking me in the diaphragm, causing terrible heartburn, and a brutal cough that caused stabbing pain. A few days ago, I was bragging about how much easier it is not to have a breech baby. I didn’t have that brutal pain in my diaphragm and the cough wasn’t nearly as bad, even though my heartburn was intense.

It seems I spoke too soon, because the cough has intensified (not sure if I’m sick or it’s just from the severe reflux/indigestion) and I am getting a hefty kick in the ribs every time the coughing resumes (this time from a foot instead of a head).

I am resting at home, but rapidly running out of sick time. The plan is for me to continue at work for 2 and a half more weeks, and baby is set to arrive via scheduled c-section a week after I stop work. But I’m starting to think that I need to rest before having major surgery. I can’t teach in the state I’m in and no amount of lying in bed seems to be helping. Off to the Dr. tomorrow to see what they can do.

Anyone know of a natural remedy to help with a terrible cough? Even hot tea with honey and lemon don’t seem to help, nor do throat lozenges or gargling with salt water… definitely feel like I’ve hit the wall and the universe is telling me it’s time to slow down.

Last leg

How have I landed here so soon? The summer is coming to a close and I return to work in a few short days… such is the life of a teacher. Saying good-bye to summer vacation is always difficult. It’s all the more challenging this year because I’m in my third trimester of pregnancy and just starting to really feel tired and worn out. Which leads me to ask myself, “what the F*#! were you thinking when you decided to go back to work this fall?”

To top it off, I’ve just found out that I have gestational diabetes (GD), although only very slightly. There was one number (of three) that was ever so slightly elevated on my test. My doctors think that I had GD in my first pregnancy, but the screening test has improved slightly, so they believe they missed it last time. It makes sense that I had diabetes during my previous pregnancy; among other things Maya’s blood sugar crashed big time right after birth, requiring medical interventions, and the nurses kept telling me that it was really unusual for that to happen unless I had GD.

Now, I have to prick my finger 4-5 times daily to determine my blood sugar levels and adjust my diet accordingly. I’m kind of neurotically healthy with my food choices to begin with, so I’m finding it hard to believe that I have to make changes. Plus, I have celiac disease which is enough to manage in and of itself. Adding a diabetic diet to this is extraordinarily complicated. I keep telling myself: 10 more weeks, no big deal. But with the hormones, fatigue and added stress of starting work, I’m beginning to think it’s going to be a very long last leg.